U.S. President Joe Biden is considering a release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as a possible move to reduce gasoline prices in the United States, after OPEC+ ignored on Thursday calls for putting extra barrels on the market, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told Bloomberg on Friday.

“The SPR is certainly on the table as an option. The president will have more to say about that,” Secretary Granholm said when asked what America can do now to reduce gasoline prices.

The SPR is the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil, and it currently holds around 600 million barrels of crude.

“The Biden Administration is very concerned about the price at the pump,” Granholm added.

On Thursday, the OPEC+ group decided to continue easing the collective oil production cuts by just 400,000 barrels per day next month, ignoring calls from the United States and other major oil-consuming nations to open the taps and tame the price rally. The rationale for keeping a cautious approach seems to be assessments from OPEC+ experts that Q4 would see a smaller market deficit than expected earlier and that the balance would tip into surplus next year…read more.